Can Existentialism be a Posthumanism?: Beauvoir as Precursor to Material Feminism

In this article, I demonstrate that Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy represents a first major step toward a rejection of the humanist subject and therefore was influential for the development of contemporary posthumanist material feminism. Specifically, her unprecedented attention to embodiment and biology, in The Second Sex and other works, as well as her notion of ambiguity, serve to challenge the humanist subject. While I am not claiming that Beauvoir was a posthumanist or material feminist thinker avant la lettre, I show that she is an important precursor to some of their key ideas. Indeed, her thinking about the body, sex, gender, and the importance of embodiment and situation constitutes a challenge to the subject of humanism, thereby opening up a path for thinkers that follow to push Beauvoir's critique and articulate a posthumanism that does away with the subject of humanism.Peer reviewe

The (post)human and the (post)pandemic: rediscovering our selves

Peer reviewe

Pandemicity and Subjectivity: the posthumanist vulnerability of the zoe/geo/techno framed subject

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented global disruptions, including a fundamental alteration to how humans exist. In this paper, we argue that the disruptions brought forth by the pandemic have provided us with a new perspective that allows us to better understand the various entanglements that are constitutive of the beings we are, but that also render us fundamentally vulnerable. Grounded in a posthumanist material feminist position, we adopt a view of matter as entangled and embrace the notion of agentic capacity while elaborating a definition of posthumanist subjectivity and its peculiar vulnerability. Building our analysis on Rosi Braidotti’s formulation of the zoe/geo/techno assemblage, we further develop this frame navigating through the different entanglements that constitute the posthumanist subjectivity we scrutinize, considering each type from the perspective of the pandemic. As we argue, the increase in one type of entanglement at the expense of others may be generative of new possibilities but can also limit our thriving. What defines us as humans is the fact that we are constituted via the threefold entanglement of zoe, geo, and techno, radically boosting one and diminishing the others—purposefully or not—is bound to have significant impacts. Further, we claim that we cannot in fact isolate one type of entanglement from the others: each impacts the other as they themselves are also entangled

Voies de signalisation impliquées dans le remodelage hypertrophique vasculaire

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

Le nihilisme est-il un humanisme? : étude sur Nietzsche et Sartre

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

Is It Time to Shift Our Environmental Thinking? A Perspective on Barriers and Opportunities to Change

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development Goals. In 2019, the release of the global assessment report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services unfortunately demonstrated that our planet may be in more trouble than expected. The main drivers have been identified for many years and relate to human activities such as over-exploitation of natural resources leading to land degradation, deforestation, ocean and atmospheric pollution, and climate change. Despite international agreements and conventions, we are gradually reaching the planet’s boundaries. In this commentary, we present an analysis of the current worldview, discuss the humanist roots of this view, and the barriers to be able to move forward with the transformative changes that are needed for sustainability. We suggest that for these transformative changes to happen, there is a need to reconnect humans with nature, and we propose that some solutions could be devised in areas like education and social media. Changing our mindsets and worldviews are the most urgent courses of action we must undertake to avoid the inevitabl